New Orleans - Day 5 - Compared to Baton Rouge

Vitalizing Downtown Baton Rouge

I hope I look this happy by the end of intern year


LSU Baton Rouge Parade Grounds

LSU Baton Rouge near Union

Today I lunched with my party god friend. We acknowledged the strong bond we had formed to one another during medical school as a result of our backgrounds. He and I came from two very different worlds which were both distanced from one another and from the worlds of the typical LSU medical student. We were very different people from our classmates yet we had to coexist peacefully with these people for 3 years. My world and his world adapted well to one another despite our differences yet neither of our worlds adapted well to those of the typical LSU medical student. It is the reason that admissions committees devote so much effort into choosing the applicants who will fit best into the group and compliment it. Apparently they weren't aware that my friend and I were a horrible fit with these people.

People have told me that it is just how things go. You go to medical school to prepare to be a physician. You make the good memories later when you are a physician. Even so, it would have been nicer to have been in an environment that was more conducive to my happiness and growth. This is why I was very careful about choosing my residency program. There were many choices in New York City, but I chose the one in which I knew I fit best with the residents and attendings and the one whose work environment I thrived in. I learned my lesson from New Orleans.

My friend dropped me off at the LSU Baton Rouge undergraduate campus and I hung out there waiting for my other friend to get out of work. At first glance the LSU campus looked just like I had remembered it, business continued as usual. Upon further inspection, there were subtle changes. For instance I searched for the office of my old German professor but I could not find it and the hallway had been infected by the math department who seemed to have taken over much of the foreign language department property. In general, LSU Baton Rouge brings to mind many more good memories than LSU New Orleans. I guess Baton Rouge was my social education which didn't really prepare me for the workworld with a German major and New Orleans was my academic education which prepared me for residency but didn't do much for me socially. My hopes are that the Mt. Sinai residency will fuse the social and the academic.

My other friend eventually came by to pick me up. She looked happy. She is an intern in Baton Rouge and got slammed after the Hurricane, working way more hours than she should have. The good news was that she was on consults this month so she had a little more freetime during my visit. It was great to spend some time together and catch up and hear the happenings of old friends. She brought me to downtown Baton Rouge, where we listened to a live band for a few and ran into some people we knew. There is an effort to vitalize the center of Baton Rouge. I believe this is necessary because the population is 600,000 and growing - it is a huge overgrown suburb - they need a real downtown feel.

So we finished the evening with dinner then the movie Friends with Money, which I expected more out of. I don't know if I was just exhausted or whether the movie was boring but I almost fell asleep multiple times. It falls into that category of films in which the focus is the relationships of the characters without much attention to plot or imagery.